Phallus is life’s capacity for creativity and pleasure

Becky Knight, who has a Master of Public Health in Human Sexuality, offers an excerpt from Thomas Moore's The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love, under her title A Religious Appreciation for the Penis on her blog, Living Sexuality. This excerpt includes Moore's views:

"The penis we see in pornography is not the true phallus; it is rather a poor attempt to restore the phallic dimension to the penis. Pornographic penises are symptomatic of our need to rediscover the phallus and with it a religious appreciation for life’s mysterious potency. Like the ancients carrying huge penises in their processions, we fantasize penises of unusual dimension and photograph them in ways that make them seem huge and detached from individual personality. But we don’t yet have a religious appreciation for the penis as the presentation of life’s almighty power. Religious institutions remain close to pornography, sometimes in their art and sometimes in their ingenious means of repression, because ultimately both are concerned with life’s deepest meaning and mystery."